Former Repository editor Jack Maxwell dies at age 95

Saturday

Former editor of The Repository, Jack Maxwell, died this morning at the Waterford at St. Luke. He had lived there for the past three years. He was 95 years old.

This is a story about the death and life of John A. “Jack” Maxwell. But it won’t be nearly as good or complete as the story you should be able to read on Sunday’s obituary page — in an obituary the former editor of The Repository wrote for himself.

“He was rewriting it all the time, always fine-tuning. You know how editors are,” said his daughter, Bobbi Young.

Maxwell was 95 years old when he died at 9:30 Friday morning at the Waterford at St. Luke.

Maxwell had planned to attend Friday’s Rotary Club of Canton luncheon at the McKinley Grand Hotel. He had asked a nurse’s aide to let him sleep in for a few more minutes in the morning. When the aide returned, he was dead, according to Maxwell’s daughter.

His funeral arrangements are pending at Arnold Funeral Home.

What he did with all those years, though, is what the people who crossed paths with him always will remember:

Husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather.

McKinley High cheerleader.

U.S. Navy veteran.

Sports writer, assistant city editor, features editor and editor of The Repository, as well as The Marion (Ohio) Star.

Member of Church of the Savior United Methodist Church.

A Rotarian for the past 57 years.

A public-relations wizard for both the College of Wooster and the Pro Football Hall of Fame Festival. Member, president or chairman of a host of civic organizations.

If it was for a good cause, Maxwell probably was involved.

“He looked kind of gruff ... but he was so soft,” said Janice Meyer, former director of the Hall of Fame Festival, who first worked with him when he was The Repository editor from 1969 to 1980, then later when Maxwell was a public-relations consultant for Meyer and the Festival.

David Kaminski, also a former Repository editor, worked for Maxwell for six years. He said the two maintained a bond after that because Maxwell understood what it was like to sit in the editor’s chair.

“I could speak to him kind of candidly,” Kaminski said.

In order, Maxwell’s heart was held by the Rotary Club of Canton, Church of the Savior and the College of Wooster, his alma mater, his daughter said.

And though she and her brother, Richard, spent formative years in Marion when their father was editor at that city’s paper for 16 years, Canton was special.

“The Repository was his career home,” she said.

Current Festival Director Joanne Murray said she cherished annual holiday luncheons Maxwell hosted for about a dozen of his “ladies,” women who had worked with and for him through the years.

And, of course, his Christmas letters, which signaled the arrival of the holiday season.

“Those letters related what he cared about the most — family. He would so proudly write about the accomplishments of each of his children and grandchildren, and you could just picture a beaming smile on his face as he wrote.”

Maxwell’s wife of 52 years, Margaret W. “Peg” Winchell, died in 1993.

“His wife, Peg, was truly the love of his life,” Murray said. “I never saw two people so perfectly matched, and I don’t think he ever quite got over her passing.”

Maxwell even is credited with being John Dean’s “deep-throat” of sorts on former President Warren G. Harding. Dean, who once served as President Richard Nixon’s White House counsel, was a former neighbor of Maxwell’s in Marion.

It was then that Dean became intrigued with Harding and began to doubt some of what had been previously written in another book.

Dean’s curiosity turned into a book, “Warren G. Harding,” which was published in 2004. In the introduction, Dean wrote: Mr. Maxwell ... didn’t think that the former president had been treated very fairly by history. ... This from a man who didn’t strike me as a fan of Harding’s, rather a person committed to the truth.”

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